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LostInParadise's avatar

What numbers of items cannot be listed sequentially in 4 columns (see details)?

Asked by LostInParadise (31923points) July 9th, 2015

This is a common listing scheme. The items are listed sequentially in each column and the last item of a column comes just before the first item in the next column. Each column must have the same number of items, except the last, which may have fewer items, but must have at least one.

For example, if there are 26 items, the first column has 1 to 7, the next has 8 to 15, then 16 to 22 and 23 to 26.

There are two numbers that cannot be listed this way. What are they? If we generalize to c columns, how many different numbers of items in terms of c cannot be represented by this scheme?

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